The Jabberwock Valentine

3

I opened my eyes, and the world outside was deceptively pleasant: friendly sun, blue skies, a fluttering of birds outside the bedroom window.

The sun’s brilliance suggested midmorning. Puffy-eyed, I stumbled into the shower. Sleep, when it came finally, had been deep, dark, a flight into temporary death.

Steady now. The little rituals: shower, shave, brush the teeth, get dressed, comb the hair.

While I made the automatic motions, I tried to cast my thought in the mold of Lissa. More than two years now since the fifth body had washed ashore in Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove, quite a bit of rope for a reporter of Lissa’s gifts. It wasn’t difficult to comprehend what had sparked her first curiosity. Five corpses. All young males. All drowned. Same location, same time each year. Who were they, really? Did they have anything in common? And the common ancestry had hooked Lissa.

She had probably wanted to go at it full-time, but a metropolitan editor involved in the large scene wouldn’t have seen it that way. What you smoking these days, Lissa? What’s this poppycock? Even if you devise a spook tale out of a riverfront town, so what? Louisiana abounds in spook tales, stories of voodoo queens, ghosts in the spreading live oak where Creole aristocrats fought duels, haunted mansions. If we’re to go the sleazy tabloid route, why not go out to one of the rat holes today, buy a love potion or pin-stuck doll, and tell our readers about it? You should be in Baton Rouge, Lissa, telling me who is behind the sugar quota bill; you should be in Houston finding out where the oil brokers from Louisiana are meeting with their buddies in Texas; you should be tracing the ownership of the plot on which Parks and Recreation, City of New Orleans, is going to squander another million, sure as a piss ant crawls. Now get the hell to Baton Rouge, Lissa — and I can’t pass up the old compliment that you’re pretty when you’re angry.

So it would have gone, whetting her interest the more, returning her spare time and thoughts again and again to Wickens.

When I came out into the upper hall, I heard the whirr of a vacuum cleaner downstairs. That would be Reba. She and Clyde, middle-aged couple, were the domestic staff, having a small home adjacent to the Marlowe place. Reba arrived each day and Clyde pruned, raked, fixed leaks, and painted as need arose, doing a little truck farming and fishing.

The vacuum was racketing in the living room, a counterpoint to Reba’s work rhythm as she sang an old hymn. (“Oh, Beulah Land, sweet Beulah land, as on the highest mount I stand...”) Her tempo would get her through the living room in short order.

Seeing no one about, I went on to the secrets of the large, airy kitchen with its walk-in cooler, gas range, sinks of old-timey zinc, racked pots and pans of cast iron and copper. A work area centered the room and a sunny breakfast nook bay-windowed on the east.

Too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. I sure as hell had been out like a light once I tipped over the edge.

Hot coffee was in the urn, and I cut crusty Louisiana French bread for toast and found marmalade in the pantry.

I was munching, listening to the house, anxious to hear those little details Lissa might have left unsaid, when footsteps sounded and George appeared in the doorway.

A smile creased his hewn face. “Must have been the Louisiana air.”

“Someone should have called me.”

“Why? You got an appointment with the ambassador from Paraguay? How’s the coffee holding out?”

“Tastes like it was just made.”

He reached into the china cabinet for a big white mug that had his initial on it.

“Hate to eat and run, George.” I dropped my napkin beside the marmalade-smeared saucer. “But I want to talk to Lissa.”

He glanced as he turned the urn spigot. “She’s not here.”

“Oh?”

“She left about half an hour ago.”

“Did she say where she’s going?”

He shrugged. “Who asked? Whose business?”

He sat down opposite me at the breakfast nook table. “She did mention she wouldn’t be here for lunch — popping down to New Orleans and back. Something about a detail in some records that had spewed up in her mind. (Her words.) Whatever it was, she seemed a little put out with herself that it had escaped notice before. ‘Spewed up in her mind’... tendency to overwrite despite her brilliance, wouldn’t you say? She told Elva she’d be back long before dinner. My guess is that she’s gone off to buy a birthday-valentine gift for Valentina. Those two... they trinket-shop for each other as if they were buying for Saint Anne.”

He was looking at me over the top of the coffee mug. “Anything wrong, Cody?”

Was anything right? I shook my head. Nothing for it now, except to wait until Lissa got back. I said, “You’ve known Val a long time.”

“All her life. Her mother and I... everyone was sure we’d wind up married.”

“What happened?”

His lips made an ironic smile. “Career... I was hell-set on the army. Dedication to the ambition, you might say, got me in West Point despite the muscularity between the ears. Elva was hell-set against it. Radical kid in those days. Flower child, Saint Joan of the armies of righteousness. The saps do run high when you’re young, don’t they? We had attitudinal difficulties, it’s safe to say, estrangements based on noncompromise of principles, which are the worst estrangements of all, pigheaded stubbornness on the part of both, pride, and wounded hearts. I had my career and she ended up marrying Charles Marlowe. I’d like to call him a bastard, but he was a fine man, Cody. He passed on...”

“When Val was fifteen,” I said. “She’s told me about him. She was never close to him.”

“It happens with kids sometimes. They were cut in different dispositions, but she respected him, and he never had a moment’s trouble with her.”

“Val would never give anyone trouble, George. If the relationship was like that, then excise the relationship, however painful.”

“Like her mother,” he said.

“You never married?”

His beefish shoulders lifted, dropped. “Mistresses. Not cheap. Lived with three women all told. The relationships were nicer than most run-of-the-mill marriages. Difference between me and a lot of officers, I didn’t change mistresses at every post, with a wife back home. Very fond of all three, but the kind of love a man should have for a woman got stranded at the altar in Saint Louis Cathedral the day Elva married Charles Marlowe. I was a shavetail on duty in Panama that day.”

“Did you see Elva often after that?”

He laughed, brief belly laugh. “Son, I came back here on my first leave after her marriage, spit and polish, sabers at the ready. Ah, youth... I was full of fire to duel old Charlie or something like that and drag Elva off by the hair. She kept us apart. And after that meeting with her, I knew she was too Catholic to divorce him. Sure, I saw her now and then during my career years, small town, old family ties. You don’t move around much in Wickens without the bumping-into.”

He reached across to slap my shoulder. “You can bet your last franc I see her often nowadays.”

“Why don’t you marry her, George?”

“Hell, I intend to. I think she keeps stalling because of Val.”

My frown questioned.

He spread his hands. “It nettles me, I’ll admit, but no throwing down of the gauntlet this time. I can wait. It’s like she’s got some kind of notion she shouldn’t think solely of herself, but should wait to tie the knot until Val is safely married and the last shred of umbilical cord cut for good. What the devil’s wrong with you, Cody? Val’s the loveliest, most sensitive, intelligent woman on earth, and I can’t believe you’re a man with a stuck zipper. Heaven’s sake, Cody, marry the girl and get her the hell out of our hair.”

Before I responded, Reba came into the kitchen, pleasant, robust, giving me a sniff. “Had a special cut of country ham to go with the eggs and grits for you, Mr. Barnard, and you come sneaking down behind my back.”

“I’m sorry, Reba.”

She went to the dishwasher to remove crockery. “Now you know. No excuse.”

George stood and stretched, lazily and contentedly. “Well, Cody, what’s on for today? Name it, and I’ll tell you if I’m amenable or any good at it.”

“I really must talk to Lissa.”

“Then I’ll wander over to the country club and see if I can catch a foursome or try a hand at a penny-ante poker game. Come on over. You’ll meet likable people.”

“Thanks, George.”

As he went out, I said to Reba, “The house is very quiet. Did Val and Elva go out?”

She nodded. “They went downtown to do some last-minute shopping for the valentine-birthday party. You’ll have a ball! Real blowout every year, Val coming home and all, paper lanterns and people all over the lawn. Caterers are brought in so’s me and Clyde and Elva ain’t got a thing to do but have fun. Last year, Lissa hired a genuine Dixie band to come from New Orleans. Sakes alive, I wondered if those decrepit old blacks had played the processional for Noah to enter the ark. The old boys propped themselves up on the bandstand George had planked together on the lawn, and when that music started — day of miracles. Those fellows shed about thirty years apiece, first tune, and they got younger and stronger with every note. Lawdy, my blood is still singing from that music.”

“Any Louchards at the party, Reba?”

She stiffened, then slowly slipped the last plate from the dishwasher. “Where’d you hear that name?”

“Val’s part Louchard, isn’t she?”

“There ain’t no more Louchards, Mr. Barnard,” she said thinly. “The last to bear the name was Valentina’s great grandfather. He had but one daughter. The name ain’t gonna be found in any Wickens phone books.”

I didn’t press Reba. She’d let me know I was on verboten ground. Marie Louchard’s conspiracy to murder seven Yankee boys in 1865 was not a subject for conversation in a region where family trees still cast long shadows.

The respectful quality of my silence was the best ploy, though I’d used it inadvertently. Reba was thinking about it and as she stacked the dishes, she cleared her throat and said, “I reckon you’ll be part of the family and have a right to know. So to save you folks trouble, I’ll give you the Louchard bit — if you’ll take it as the meaningless bit of scandal it is, let it go at that, and keep your mouth shut on any further question.”

“Agreed, Reba.” I looked at her with fresh interest. “Fire away.”

“Ain’t much firing, really. Marie Louchard, the ancestress you don’t talk about, was a dilly in capital letters. At fifteen she was in a wealthy planter’s pants long enough to rob him. She shilled for a riverboat gambler. She was come-on for a saloon keeper who rolled his passed-out patrons in a back alley. She was part of them hoodoo’ers for a while, would go to their bonfires and naked dances in swamp glens. She bedded with that cutthroat Alberto Batione y Ochoa, who was spawned by families worse than Attila and Hitler. She had a bastard boy, Ranee Louchard, who was doubtless the seed of Alberto. He ended up on the gallows for cutting a trapper’s throat and selling the pelts, but not before he’d sired a son, who sired a daughter, who was Valentina’s grandmother. And that’s the whole of it, Mr. Barnard.”

“How did she end up, this dilly of an ancestress?”

“The story goes that she gave her bastard away, met a ship’s captain, went to live in France, turned professional with her hoodoo dancing, making a great hit, toast of Paris. Her salon became the watering place for artists, writers, musicians, high-ranking politicians. She lived to a great age, passing peacefully in her château in the south of France.”

“Some woman.”

“And I guess ninety percent of it ain’t fable. You want anything else?”

I shook my head, thanked her, and left the kitchen.

Once a stable, the garage was perhaps fifty yards off behind the house where the graveled driveway ended. A pickup truck was inside the sprawling frame building, keys in the ignition. Always wheels of some sort around, Val had said, so help yourself anytime you feel ambulatory.

I got in the truck, backed out, turned it, and drove off, trying to recall the street pattern between the Marlowe place and downtown.

The Sword occupied a three-story concrete-and-glass building in an area that had received city and private sector planning and reclamation money. Old structures had been razed to make way for a shopping arcade, off-street parking, a modern high rise, an arts center.

The state seal and motto were inlaid in the terra-cotta flooring of the spacious entry foyer. The main-floor office was a busy, sweeping array of desks devoted to advertising, bookkeeping, circulation. Wicket gates and a counter confined the public. A girl came to the counter, smiling and asking what she could do for me.

I told her who I was and asked if I could see Keith. She clicked a switch and intercommed with someone upstairs.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Barnard. Mr. Vereen is out. He’s on the parks commission and an inspection of some sort was scheduled this morning. If you’d care to wait, the reception room is off the foyer, a TV, copies of the paper...”

“May I wait for Mr. Vereen in your library?”

“He may be out all day and just phone in. But if you like, the morgue is on the third floor. You can take the self-service elevator in the foyer. I’ll tell Mr. Vereen’s secretary where you are, and let Miss Kitterling know you’re coming up.”

“Thank you.”

Miss Kitterling was a grayish, spare, pleasantly smiling woman in a long, brightly lighted warren of filing cabinets, tables strewn with clippings, packed bookshelves, and microfilm equipment.

An efficient woman, she soon had me seated at a small table whereon was a monitor screen, beside which she deposited the films I requested.

“I’ll see if my computer gives me any further cross-indexing, Mr. Barnard, but I’m sure this is the batch of it.”

I thanked her, and she retired to her long table and clipping shears, giving me a covert glance that expressed curiosity... an assistant secretary of state, personal friend of Mr. Vereen’s, poring through files covering St. Valentine’s Day, unsolved murders of the past ten years.

I imagined she would have a go at the files herself, once the mysterious stranger was out of sight. She wouldn’t find any answers, I finally admitted to myself. She wouldn’t know what she was actually looking for. I knew vaguely, and I didn’t find any answers.

The stories were routinely out of police records: DEAD MAN FOUND IN MAD FRENCHWOMAN’S COVE. DEAD WOMAN FOUND IN APARTMENT. MAN SOUGHT IN SHOOTING. GIRL STRANGLED IN BACK ALLEY.

I thought of the Atlanta child murders and how many little black boys had died before the city got the drift. Sometimes you do have to hit people over the head to get their attention. The Atlanta case had two critical elements: black boys, and a compressed time frame.

The Wickens situation lacked both. No visible relationship or common link between the victims — until Lissa, only Lissa had glimpsed a shred of light. No mounting certainty that next week or the week after would yield a dead body of prescribed race and color.

Just a body fished out of Mad Frenchwoman’s Cove now and then, some of them coincidentally on St. Valentine’s Day. Start digging in that direction and you might find Yuletide, even Halloween victims.

Without critical elements, there was no hue and cry, no marshaling of special forces by police, not even the same detective quoted in consecutive years, except for the past two. His name was Homicide Detective Max Dufarge.

I thanked Miss Kitterling for her hospitality and asked the directions to police headquarters.

It was less than two blocks distant.

“Max is out, can I help you?”

“Out on a case?” I asked the burly desk sergeant.

He nodded. “That’s his job, isn’t it? Girl this time, right under our noses.”

“Your noses?”

“Cruddy parking garage... girl strangled, body in her car... before this, too many muggings, senior citizens mostly, like we should patrol every level around the clock.”

Phones were ringing; a lawyer was haggling bail for a client; two cops dragged in a wildly resisting drunk.

“This girl — have you identified her?”

The desk sergeant grimaced. “Max and his people just got over there and cordoned it off. She must have been killed within the hour. Max just radioed in for a make on a tag number and driver’s license issued to a Lissa Aubunelli.”

A captain was yelling at the sergeant from a frosted glass cubicle.

The sergeant muttered a curse under his breath. “Look, friend, the public is always curious. That’s why we have TV. You can see all about it on the evening newscast.”